December 20, 1990

Michael Milken is headed for jail. Alan Bond and Robert Campeau no longer run the sprawling businesses they built through daring acquisitions. Donald Trump is living on an allowance from his bankers. Compared with these other entrepreneurs, who also gambled that the robust business climate of the 1980's would endure, Rupert Murdoch is faring well. Nevertheless, Mr. Murdoch is facing a time of reckoning for his strategy of loading up on short-term debt to finance the astonishing growth of the News Corporation, his global media enterprise. In recent months, even as Mr. Murdoch spent endless hours negotiating to reschedule billions of dollars of debt, he has cut back dramatically on his spending -- most notably by merging Sky Television, his British satellite broadcasting venture, with its major competitor. Bankers in turn have temporarily extended loans that have come due.

The New York State Public Service Commission yesterday authorized the New York Telephone Company to raise the price of local phone service by about 7 percent for residential customers and 2 percent for business customers. But the actual increases will be much larger for customers in both categories who make only a few calls within their community, and smaller for those who make many calls to nearby communities, for which they are billed separately.

IN the visions-of-sugarplums department, big glossy books on decoration and design have always made appealing Christmas presents. These days they also stack up as the decorative accessory of the moment, right up there with folk-art birdhouses. Anyone who doubts this should turn immediately to MANHATTAN STYLE (Little, Brown, $40) and PRIVATE NEW YORK: REMARKABLE RESIDENCES (Abbeville, $50). Both of these coffee-table books have dust jackets featuring tables laden with coffee-table books. Either would bring cheer to a New Yorker starved for a bit of municipal boosterism.

American forces in the Persian Gulf will not be ready to attack Iraq by Jan. 15, the deadline the United Nations has set for Baghdad to withdraw its forces from Kuwait, a senior United States commander said today. The candid assessment by the officer, Lieut. Gen. Calvin A. H. Waller, the deputy commander of American forces in the gulf, had the effect of undermining the Bush Administration's policy of applying pressure on Iraq in advance of Jan. 15. The Administration has wanted to leave the impression that if Iraq does not withdraw from Kuwait by then, it faced the risk of imminent military conflict.

A 53-year-old Bronx pastor with a reputation as a mentor for young people and an advocate for the troubled and the homeless was killed on Tuesday in a fall from the window of his fourth-floor apartment. The Rev. Noah Wellington Lewis of St. Matthew's A.M.E. Church in the Morris Heights section was found by a resident shortly before 6:30 P.M. on a grassy hill inside the Fordham Hill Oval housing complex. He was pronounced dead at Jacobi Hospital.